Pedro Martinez stood up at his own foundation gala in Boston on Saturday and told both sides to stop the games before they start. The man won a World Series here. He gets to ask for something, and what he asked for is the easiest thing in the sport: a deal.
“So stop the crap around and get something done and don’t lock out baseball for the fans,” he said. It was the cleanest sentence anyone connected to this fight has produced all fall.
“I’m pissed. Honestly speaking, I’m pissed.”
Pedro Martinez minced no words about the upcoming lockout, imploring MLB's owners and players to reach a deal for the sake of baseball's fans.https://t.co/79j5j7C1Q3
— Mac Cerullo (@MacCerullo) November 8, 2026
The MLB lockout everyone is bracing for hangs on December 1, the day the current CBA expires, and ESPN has said that a lockout appears imminent. Imminent is not done. That gap is the only reason to write this.
Here is what each side is actually doing with it. The owners want a salary cap, and their latest offer would hold off putting it in place until 2028. Pushing the cap back two years concedes nothing. The players have stayed steadfast against any cap talk at all, and ESPN’s read is that it would take a massive break within the MLBPA to change that.
Give the owners their one real argument. Small and middle-market clubs say they cannot regularly compete with the big-market teams, and a cap is their answer. Fine. It is also an answer to a question fans of those clubs did not ask the league to solve by shutting the sport down in December.
Pedro knows what a stoppage costs, because he lived one. In 1994 he was in his third big-league season and his first full year as a starter for Montreal, 11-5 with a 3.42 ERA. The Expos were 74-40 and six games up in the NL East when the players struck in August. The owners later canceled the rest of the season and the World Series. Montreal had the best record in baseball and got nothing for it.
That is the useful part of listening to him. There is nothing sentimental in it. He watched a very good team get erased by two groups of people who each thought the other would flinch first.
His read on the current moment is that baseball is good right now, and he feels for the fans. He is right about that too. Nobody needs a 2026 postseason recap to know the game has been fun to watch lately, which is exactly what makes this such a stupid time to burn it down.
Red Sox fans have an extra reason to hate the calendar. The club fired its manager in April, and the offseason questions in Boston were already enough to chew through the winter. A lockout freezes all of it. The front office can answer none of those questions until the owners and the union stop staring at each other, and fans get to refresh their feeds for news that does not exist.
Owners and players are about to spend a pile of goodwill they did not earn. The last two labor fights, in 1994 and in 2021-22, both left fans with nothing to do but wait and be annoyed. Pedro just reminded everybody that he, for one, remembers.
Sign it, you two. Some of us have a winter to get through.
